Recently watch this video from Capture One Pro where David Grover talks with Joe McNally about shooting at the Olympics. During the course of the discussion Joe mentions that he shot about 53,000 images during the 16 days of the Olympics. If you want to get the shot you have to take the shot. Interesting discussion on the trials of shooting a pandemic Olympics. Or you can just watch it so you can be amazed by the great images Joe always produces.
In the digital age we are so lucky to not have the costs of film and processing. You try dividing 53,000 images by 36 shots per role and you get a feel for the national debt. (Hint: 1473 rolls of film). Plus with digital you can always dial in the correct color balance.
Moral of the story is that if you are not taking a lot of pictures you should be.
Recently while watching a webinar on Capture One Pro one of the attendees wished that he could adjust the order that the Fujifilm Simulations were listed when selecting the profile to use on an image.
The reasoning was that he wasn’t sure which simulation was the one he wanted to use on an image. I didn’t see a real need as I only use a couple of them and it easy just mouse over each simulation to see what it does to the image.
Given that the Auto simulation is the simulation that you have set in you Fujifilm camera, I rarely find that I need to look at more than two other simulations. In camera I tend to use STD which is PROVIA (STANDARD). The more I thought about it the more I realized that my default simulation works a lot of the time. What I did realize is that I change most when there is a lot of sky or no sky. When the sky make a big part of the image i tend to use CLASSIC CHROME while if there is little or no sky, I tend to stay with PROVIA or if the image calls for it I will crank it up with Velvia see previous post about that. Now on big sky images it is mostly personal preference but I tend to use CLASSIC CHROME for its more muted blues (with a hint of green) but if the sky isn’t necessarly the subject I’ll probably use PROVIA.
What I have found is that I’ve come to know the simulations by how they treat the blue parts of the image:
Classic Chrome is a more muted blue with a slightly green tint.
Standard has a nice rich blue without going overboard.
Velvia has a saturated blue with a slightly purple tint.
So as I look at the image I can decide on which simulation based on what I want the blue to do in the image. Then go right to simulation I want.
Classic Chrome
Provia (STD)
Velvia (VIVID)
It takes some time to get used to what each simulation does to colors and contrast but once you do you can quickly dial in what you want. The same thing works for the black and white simulations (although those are all right together). If you want a dark sky go with the Red filter.
The recent upgrade to Capture One Pro (version 21.1.1 also 14.1.1) has added what they call Style Brushes. You can make your own style brushes plus there are a number of quite nice standard style brushes. Style brushes differ from Styles in that Styles takes over the whole layer. If you are on the background layer when you apply a style it may/will change setting of different effects. Style Brushes on the other hand are more specific. When you choose a style brush you get a new layer with no applied mask. You then brush in the style exactly where you want it to be.
You can create your own style brushes too. Posting on creating your own will have to wait. Today’s image was created using several standard style brushes plus one of my own (called Clarity Plus) that allows you to slowly brush clarity on to my image. I used it mostly along the line of blue on the right past the engine to the end of the wings on the left.
Style Brushes really do make you think differently about how you process your images. I’ve change my workflow because these are so easy to incorporate. More to come…
Sometimes images demand that you go outside your normal style, outside your comfort zone. And sometimes images demand that you just go in there and push the boundaries. To everyone who thinks this is too over the top saturated, yeah but I love it.
I went remote the other day and took my laptop along for the ride. As I did a lot of image making I took along a drive and created a new Capture One catalog for the trip. I didn’t do a lot of editing while on the move so when I got back I just copied the images to my at home storage location and then imported them into my main Capture One catalog.
When the images are already in the correct place you do not need to copy them anywhere so there is an option on the import to just add the images in their current location to the open catalog. This is real handy if you have already downloaded you images and do not need the import process to copy them from an external drive.
Add to Catalog
The thing you must remember is that after you are done ingesting the images and are ready to go back to importing the images from the camera SD card you need to change back to the method you use for copying the images off your SD to their in computer location.
Normal Copy Destination
If you don’t remember that then the next time you import your images they will stay on you SD card and the catalog will think they will always be in that location. I forgot that step the other day after taking images of a soon to be dead flower in my front yard. I did the import, left the SD card in the slot and happily processes the good images.
Later i took the SD card out of the slot put it back in my camera and formatted it. The images that I thought had been downloaded had not been and the next time I opened my main catalog the images were marked as offline which is 100% true now that I think about it but perplexed me at the time. I ended up losing the images.
When attached to your computer the SD card looks just like another disk drive and Capture One will happily use it as such. One thing I’m rather surprised about is that Capture One does not seem to have overall presets for the import process. Not that would have saved me. For the next 30 days please find me in the corner wearing my dunce cap.
Using the “Rule of Thirds” or other constructs to ensure your image is balanced and working towards where the eye goes first in a image is a way to improve your images or at least verify the image against a standard grid.
I was watching a webinar yesterday and the presenter didn’t know that the Crop Tool in Capture One could display a “Rule of Thirds” or other grids as an overlay on an image. You can also show the grid at anytime by clicking on the Grid Icon on the Toolbar at the of the Capture One workspace.
The grid icon in Capture One
So at any point in time you can show the currently configured grid by just clicking on the icon. You can also set up to display the current grid every time you select the crop tool. This will allow you to crop and position an image to a pleasing position. You turn on the grid in the crop tool by checking the Show Grid While Cropping checkbox in the Crop tool.
Crop Tool Configuration
The Grid tool controls which of three different grids Capture One provides displays when activated. The most common and adjustable one is the Rectangular grid. The Long Edge and Short Edge values determine how many lines in each direction. The 3×3 pattern is your standard Rule of Thirds. You can make any number of grids with this option although at some point you may have more lines than image if you get carried away. Similar to the Rectangular grid is the Golden Ratio grid with I won’t go into much here other than to say it a center weighted 3×3 grid.
Rectangular Grid
You can change the color of the grid so if you are working on an image with one predominate color you can find something that you can actually see. Follow Crop keeps the grid contained in the area of the crop. The image with the rectangular overlay looks like this.
Rule of Thirds Grid
The other option is the Fibonacci Spiral which is starts with a small square and doubles the size of the square over and over 1×1, 2×2, 4×4 etc. Which gives a spiral which that can be used to move from the subject of the image around and around as the eye would go.
Fibonacci Spiral
The Clockwise and Mirror checkboxes are used to determine which quarter of the image the spiral starts on.
Fibonacci Spiral
So Capture One has the tools to aid you in balancing your image that can come in handy. I usually have the 3×3 Rectangular grid set when I crop. It doesn’t hurt to see where things line up but remember you are the image maker and if you want to place the subject of the image somewhere other than what some rules says, go ahead and do it. If you are trying for balance the Grid Tool just might help.
Fujifilm X-Trans images stand up to some pretty hard conditions. Low light, high ISO, Strange color balances.
Avatar :: Fujifilm X-T2 XF 18-55mmF2.8-4 R LM OIS ISO 3200 F5 1/20 seconds 21.4mm
Taken while on queue for Flight of Passage in Pandora Animal Kingdom Walt Disney World. Considering that this was taken thru a glass wall of a Pandorian avatar floating in a tank of liquid, it came out really well. Processed in Capture One Pro 21.
I’ve tried shooting fireworks for some time now with some but not a lot of success. I finally found the advise I needed from a four year old David Bergman YouTube video.
December may be a weird time to talk about firework as they are usually set for the fourth of July but this has not been a usual year by any means and being in Florida means that November can be a good time for fireworks too.
Holiday Fireworks : Fujifilm X-T2 XF 18-135mm F8 ISO 200 8 seconds at 45.6mm
We have a local holiday parade which besides jamming up traffic for several hours starts with a pretty good firework display. I used David’s settings, got my focus point set just before infinity, and was able to get a number of pleasing shots. We did have an almost full moon that evening which was just behind the clouds. With an 8 second exposure I did get a small airplane on the left side of the image below.
Images were processed in Capture One Pro 20 and additional tweaking in Nik Software 3.0.
Trick is that the exposure of 8 seconds means you have to wait a bit before you can verify that you have the right focal length to get all of the fireworks in frame but not to far away.
So thanks to David Bergman for the best version of how to shoot fireworks. Can’t wait until we can have a real 4th of July or maybe get Disney to bring back nightly fireworks.
I have never been that big a fan of Adobe’s subscription model for a number of reasons. First and foremost is the way the programs break if you stop your subscription. I’ve kept the Adobe Photographers monthly plan with Photoshop and Lightroom since they introduced it a number of years ago. I’ve paid in my $119.88 a year for the last almost 8 years which means I’ve paid just under a thousand dollars.
So they came out with their upgraded software during Adobe Max last month and I went to update the programs only to find that I no longer can update because I’m on an older (but still working) iMac that is not being updated by Apple.
So technically I need to continue to provide Adobe with $10 a month to use their software without ever being able to upgrade because of my machine. If I drop the payment I lose functionality that I’ve paid for for 8 years.
My iMac will be 9 years old at the end of the month. Bought it in November 2011on black Friday. It’s a 27″ and I’ve upgraded the memory to 32 gigs and the drive to a terabyte drive. It still runs well, boots every time, and is not slow. I’m not ready to fork out another $2000 for a newer model just so I can continue to get updates from Adobe.
In all honesty I haven’t used Lightroom for at least a year as Capture One has better processing for my Fujifilm Cameras. And I really only use Photoshop for my workflow to attach Nik 3.0 software to a smart object layer of my image. Not really sure what the best move is.
I do have a small 13 Mac Book Air (which is probably about 2 years away from the same issues) so if I want to do a sky replacement I could do it on that machine but it is small in ways other than the 13″ screen.
Not so sure how much longer I will keep the subscription in that there are other software packages that will do what I need to do without the money hole at the far end.
Recently Adobe published some previews of new functionality coming to Photoshop and Lightroom. I expect these new features to be released at the end of the month at the Adobe Max Virtual Conference. Photoshop will soon have an AI enhanced sky replacement feature while Lightroom will have a new Advanced Color Grading tool.
It seems to me that while these are interesting updates the seem to be more towards add functionality to the Adobe apps that are already in other applications. Case in point take a look at the color balance tool in Capture One Pro:
Capture One Pro Color Balance
Seems fairly similar don’t you think? As of this date I believe that Luminar and ON1 both have “AI” driven sky replacement tools but since I don’t use those applications I will not comment on how similar they are to Adobes new features.
I’m getting the feeling that Adobe is now becoming a reactionary company. Instead of innovating they are just covering the features that are in other application. It would seem that Adobe with it’s resources and (a whole boatload of subscription payers) would be creating new stuff rather that duplicating what others have done with a lot less resources and a lot less money.
Over the years I’ve met quite a number of Adobe’s forward facing Evangelists and I quite like each and every one of them. Just not sure how excited they will be to now be able to say, “yes we can do that too”.
